"Two promising AI startups from China are celebrating successful stock market debuts. While their strategic focuses differ significantly, the heads of both companies are nonetheless becoming billionaires.
Barely a year after the now-proverbial "Deepseek shock," China’s AI tigers are making a powerful push onto the global stock market stage. This week alone, two highly touted companies—Zhipu AI and Minimax—made highly successful debuts on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. They follow a wave of AI chip developers that have sought listings in recent weeks, achieving spectacular share price gains.
With its IPO on Thursday, Zhipu beat Minimax to the punch by a single day—a lead it promptly leveraged to claim a unique title for itself. The company is the "world's first publicly listed enterprise focused on large language models," wrote co-founder and Chief Scientist Tang Jie—who also serves as a professor at the elite Tsinghua University—in a letter to employees. Indeed, Zhipu cultivates a distinctly academic image; loosely translated, the name "Zhipu" means something akin to "Book of Wisdom." Its team includes numerous highly decorated AI researchers. Like Tang, most hail from Tsinghua University, which is also an investor in the company.
While Beijing-based Zhipu projects a distinctly Chinese-academic persona, Shanghai-based Minimax positions itself as a global startup. The founding team of the four-year-old company consists of former employees of SenseTime—once considered one of China’s most promising AI prospects. Although CEO Yan Junjie is himself a highly successful AI scientist with a background at Tsinghua, co-founder Yun Yeyi stands out as one of the few female AI founders not only in China but globally. The 31-year-old Chief Operating Officer—a trained engineer who studied at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S.—embodies the company’s global orientation. She speaks perfect English, and in person, her choice of words and confident demeanor clearly reveal a US influence. Minimax’s leadership team consists of individuals in their early to mid-thirties, whereas the executives at Zhipu are around 50 years old. The heads of both AI startups have joined the ranks of billionaires following their companies' initial public offerings. The US magazine *Forbes* estimated Zhipu’s Liu Debing’s net worth at over two billion dollars, and Minimax’s Yan’s at even more—over three billion.
To date, only Zhipu has come under political scrutiny. A year ago, the US government placed the Beijing-based company on a sanctions list, accusing it of collaborating with the Chinese military. Zhipu immediately rejected the allegation, labeling the accusation as baseless.
According to corporate registry records, state-owned Chinese investors hold just under ten percent of the shares. However, China’s tech giants—Alibaba and Tencent—are also among the shareholders. Both are also investors in Minimax, as is Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund. The Shanghai-based company is currently facing a lawsuit filed by Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. alleging copyright infringement.
In the rankings of top AI models, Zhipu and Minimax are closely matched, with both citing rankings in which they hold a leading position. However, both still trail their US competitors—led by OpenAI—by a few percentage points. Among the open-source models dominated by China—where model weights and parameters are made publicly available—both companies hold a commanding lead. A recent analysis by authors at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, credited Minimax with rapidly growing market share.
Minimax is clearly the darling of investors. On Friday—the day of its IPO—the company’s share price surged by more than 100 percent. Its valuation climbed to the equivalent of just under twelve billion euros. Zhipu’s share price had risen by approximately twelve percent on Thursday and by 20 percent on Friday. The valuation stood at just under eight billion euros—one-third lower than that of Minimax.
Analysts noted that Minimax is more heavily focused on private end users, where growth opportunities are considered greater than those for Zhipu, which targets businesses and governments. According to its IPO prospectus, Zhipu boasts more than 8,000 institutional clients and is utilized on 80 million end devices. Minimax, for its part, states that its models and products are used by over 212 million users, as well as 100,000 companies and developers.
The Shanghai-based firm also pursues a multimedia-centric approach. Its models are not merely text-oriented; they also perform exceptionally well in the generation of videos and audio files.
The stock's performance has been somewhat more subdued than that of chip developers. This is likely attributable to the fact that political support is even more conspicuous in the latter sector, as Beijing strives to achieve independence from Nvidia's AI chips. ChatGPT—developed by OpenAI—and other Western AI chatbots remain blocked in China.
In its IPO prospectus, Zhipu describes itself as China's highest-revenue company focused independently on general large language models. However, according to company registry records, in the first half of 2025, Zhipu generated a loss of 2.4 billion yuan (290 million euros) against a revenue of 190 million yuan (approximately 23 million euros)—meaning it is operating at a massive deficit.
Zhipu’s phrasing appears designed to exclude Minimax, which posted a revenue of 53 million dollars (approximately 46 million euros) in the first nine months of 2025. However, Minimax’s loss—exceeding 500 million dollars (440 million euros)—outstrips Zhipu’s by an equally wide margin. Both Zhipu and Minimax announced plans to invest the proceeds from their IPOs primarily into further research and development. Minimax raised just over 600 million dollars, while Zhipu brought in slightly more than 550 million dollars.
The Zhipu team is roughly two-thirds larger than Minimax’s. As of last summer, Zhipu counted more than 650 developers among its ranks; according to company registry records, it currently employs just under 650 staff members subject to social security contributions. Minimax, by contrast, has 385 employees—approximately one-quarter of whom are not involved in development but rather handle sales or management. (See commentary on page 28.)” [1]
1. Chinas KI-Tiger stürmen an die Börse. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Frankfurt. 10 Jan 2026: 27 Von Gustav Theile, Shanghai
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